Innovate for Profitable Growth: Tools and Practices That Work
Innovation is the only source of sustainable competitive advantage. Indeed, companies that have mastered the art of innovation achieve demonstrably better results than their peers. But while executives generally understand that innovation is vitally important to their company’s future, most of them rate their organizations' innovation performance poorly and don't know how to turn their companies into serial innovators.
Identifying and bringing to market profitable new products, services, and business models is not just R&D's job. Employees from multiple functions, levels, geographies, and business units need to be involved in order to ensure that their company maintains a vibrant innovation pipeline – constantly generating new ideas, testing the best ones in the marketplace, and turning the winners into profitable new businesses.
This program provides specific guidelines and tools for managers and executives at all levels who want to help their organizations develop a core competence at innovation, but don't know how to proceed, where to start, or how to get involved. You will learn how to assess your company’s current innovation performance, examine the practices of leading innovators and explore the lessons from unsuccessful innovations, and decide how to get started on an innovation program.
In this program you will learn:
Why innovation is critical and pays off – especially in recessionary times
Why being an innovator is less risky than being a follower
Why innovation needs to be everyone's job, not just R&D's or top management's
Why business model innovation trumps technical or product innovation
What approaches and tools you can use to generate, select, and bring to market new products, services and business models
How to avoid the most common mistakes made by would-be innovators
How companies such as P&G, Gore, Google and Whirlpool became leading innovators
How to assess your company's current innovation performance and decide on the best way to get started on an innovation program
Who should attend?
General managers and executives/senior managers across functions who want to make innovation part of the DNA of their organizations
General managers and executives/senior managers across functions who are concerned that the creative talents of their people aren't used in service of their organizations' innovation efforts
R&D executives, managers and employees at all levels who want to ensure that the new technologies, products and services they develop become business successes
Marketing executives, managers and employees at all levels who want to uncover profitable new business opportunities that satisfy unmet or unarticulated customer needs
Executives, managers and employees at all levels and across all line and staff functions who want to learn proven approaches for identifying profitable new business opportunities for their organizations and launching them in the market at minimum risk
Faculty:
Pierre Loewe is a strategy, organization and innovation expert with over thirty years business experience in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. He has worked as a coach and consultant to senior management, as a marketing executive, and as an executive program designer and teacher.
Most recently, Pierre co-founded Strategos, a leading global strategic innovation consulting firm chaired by best-selling author and strategy guru Gary Hamel. His primary focus as a Director of the firm was on helping client teams identify and capture new growth opportunities, create and implement breakthrough strategies, and alter their organizations and processes to build an enduring innovation capability. He led such teams on several continents and in multiple industries, including consumer goods, retailing, information services, health care, software, professional services, insurance, semi-conductor manufacturing, networking equipment, energy, and industrial components.
Prior to Strategos, Pierre was a Senior Vice President at Gemini Consulting and at its predecessor company the MAC Group. He had responsibility for leading Western Region business development and delivery across industries, and chaired or was a member of several firm-wide committees. His consulting work at Gemini and at the MAC Group focused on transforming major companies into efficient, market-driven organizations. Earlier in his consulting career, he was a project manager for McKinsey & Company.
Pierre also worked as Director of Marketing for Salomon/North America, the leading sports equipment manufacturer. In that role, he played a key role in defining and successfully launching several innovative new products and product lines in the U.S. and Canada.
Pierre has been a lecturer in strategy implementation in the Fully Employed MBA program at UCLA. He has designed and run numerous tailored two- to five-day executive workshops on strategy and innovation, many of them involving participants from diverse countries and cultures. He has authored multiple articles on global strategy, strategic innovation and marketing strategy in a variety of publications and been a speaker on strategic innovation at many industry and company meetings.
Pierre holds an MS in Management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, a BS in Engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, and a BA in Economics from the Faculté de Droit et des Sciences Economiques de Paris. He is bilingual in English and French and has consulted and taught in both languages.
Refund and Cancellation Policy:
All requests for refunds must be sent by email to scuedc@scu.edu. The Executive Development Center's refund policy states that program registrants unable to attend will receive a refund under the following conditions:
More than one week prior to the program will incur a $25 processing fee
Less than one week prior to the program, no refund given
If a participant is a no-show for a program, no refund will be given
The executive Development Center reserves the right to cancel any program for which minimum enrollment is not met prior to the program's beginning date. If a program is canceled, participants will be notified, and the full registration fee will be refunded.
Substitutions and Rollover Policy:
Participant substitutions are allowed for all programs. The substitute information must be sent by email - scuedc@scu.edu or call 408-554-4521 with the substitute information: name, job title, email address, and phone number no later than 2 p.m. the day before the program begins. For participants who opt to roll into a program scheduled at a later date, a $15 fee will be incurred for each rollover. The rollover fee must be received within two weeks of request. Since program prices are subject to increase, participants who roll to a subsequent program will also be responsible for any price increase.
